Caroline's Wedding (Criticism)

Criticism

Claire Robinson

Robinson has an M.A. in English. She is a writer, editor, and former teacher of English literature and creative writing. In the following essay, Robinson examines how continuity and community are sought in the Haitian diaspora in Edwidge Danticat's "Caroline's Wedding."

The central event of "Caroline's Wedding," the marriage of a young woman from a family of Haitian immigrants living in the United States, acts as the focus for a number of cross-generational and cross-cultural conflicts. While these conflicts threaten to divide the Azile family, by extension, similar conflicts also affect the wider Haitian community, whose members find themselves separated from friends, family, and homeland due to the diaspora caused by Haiti's historical instability. The story opens with Ma making bone soup, an old Haitian ritual that she hopes will separate Caroline from her fiancé, Eric. Ma disapproves of Eric because he is not Haitian and no one in her family has married outside before. In addition, Eric's courtship of Caroline has been very different from her own husband's courtship of her. It has been informal, has involved pre-marital sex, and has been lacking in the traditional romantic, respectful courtship rituals that she proudly remembers her husband following in seeking her own hand. Worst of all, Caroline's marriage will take place not in a church, but in a judge's office. Ma compares the two and finds Caroline's arrangements disappointingly "mechanical" and typically American. The conflict is a typical clash of generations and cultures.

However, throughout the course of the story, Ma slowly and reluctantly becomes used to the idea of Caroline's marriage. It is suggested, though not made explicit, that she comes to an understanding that the old ways that she has championed for so long have their limitations. This conclusion is revealed through the slow unfolding of Ma's own tragic story, which makes clear that any advantages that Ma's marriage had over Caroline's in terms of romance and ritual were outweighed by internal weaknesses and hostile circumstances. Ma's happiness did not last. First poverty then Papa's marriage of convenience to another woman and departure for the United States helped to destroy the fabric of the marriage. While Ma continued to love her husband, he appears to have ceased to love her. Ma never gets over the grief: "My heart has a store of painful marks and that is one of them."

It is open to question whether Ma's admission of the truth about her marriage mellows her attitude toward Caroline's, but the parallels suggest that this is the case. Ma's marriage to Papa had all the traditional external formalities in place but was wrecked by betrayal, unrequited love, and grief. Caroline's wedding to Eric lacks traditional ritual, but their relationship is one of mutual trust and caring, and they almost certainly know one another better than did Caroline's parents before their wedding. The gap between Ma's expectations of her marriage and the reality prompts her late in the story to ask Grace to destroy all traces of Papa's courtship of her and their marriage after her death. Such an act would be the exact opposite of Ma's usual determination to preserve the old ways and memories at all costs.

Caroline, for her part, also subtly changes in her attitude toward Ma's traditional Haitian beliefs and practices during the course of the story. With her chemically straightened hair and non-Haitian fiancé, Caroline appears to have completely assimilated the ways of her adopted country, the United States. Her attitude toward Ma's attachments to the old rituals, such as making bone soup and attending mass, varies from good-natured tolerance, engaging in small deceptions to save Ma's feelings (such as going home after dinner at Eric's but then secretly catching a cab back to Eric's so that she can sleep with him without upsetting Ma), to plain irritation. It is clear that Caroline has no emotional attachment to Haiti's traditional beliefs — certainly not as much as Grace. Grace was born in Haiti and retains a strong sense of tradition, yet she has just been delighted to receive her U.S. citizenship. She acts as a conduit and mediator between Ma and Caroline, explaining and justifying the ways of each to the other.

The turning point for Caroline begins when she feels ill just before her wedding. This part of Caroline's journey is expressed through the symbolism of her missing forearm. When she appears in her wedding dress wearing a new false arm, she explains that she has been having phantom pain in her arm such as amputees experience, and a doctor told her that the false arm may make it go away. When Ma points out that she is not an amputee, Caroline replies that the pressure of the wedding is making her feel like one. Ma says, "In that case, we all have phantom pain." As Caroline prepares to leave Ma's home and marry the non-Haitian Eric, the pain in her arm symbolically suggests that she is more attached to her homeland and her home than she consciously realizes. Ma's comment about phantom pain underlines the symbolism. She is referring to the sense of loss that refugees and dispossessed people feel. The false arm may symbolically indicate the myriad ways that people suffering loss try to compensate and feel whole again; getting married is one way; becoming a citizen of one's adopted country is another.

Ma rescues Caroline from her pain. She takes care of her, gives her a bath, and revives her with a traditional Haitian herbal treatment. What is more, Ma knows exactly what Caroline needs because she felt the same on her wedding day. In giving herself up to Ma's care, Caroline is brought to surrender to and honor the accumulated wisdom of countless generations of Haitian women. It is evident that Ma's attitude towards Caroline's marriage has thawed when she tells Caroline that she is eager to be a guest in her new house, the first overture she has made towards the couple in their new life together. The episode shows the relationship between mother and daughter to be unique and irreplaceable. It emphasizes the continuity that will overcome their physical separation through Caroline's marriage. Each comes to understand and accept the other. Danticat's use of Haitian ritual and tradition underlines this point. At the beginning of the story, Ma employs an old Haitian ritual — the making and serving of bone soup — against Caroline, to try to separate her from Eric. But at the story's end, she turns to the healing ritual of the herbal bath to calm and support her daughter before her marriage.

Traditions such as these enable Haitians everywhere to reconnect with lost loved ones, culture, and homeland through times of suffering and diaspora. But keeping those traditions alive depends upon memory. In Laura Jamison's review for the San Francisco Examiner of Krik? Krak!, "The Exquisite Tales of Edwidge Danticat," Danticat is quoted as saying, "In Haiti, memories are important. They give you hope for the future if present circumstances are not very good." Memory is a major theme of "Caroline's Wedding." It is also one of Grace's chief preoccupations. Grace finds that preserving the memory of Haitian traditions is not easy in the face of modern life in a very different country. She becomes upset when her father, in a dream on the night after Caroline's wedding, accuses her of having forgotten how to play the question-and-answer game. He asks her, "What kinds of legends will your daughters be told? What sort of charms will you give them to ward off evil?" For the first time, she feels afraid of him. She feels disturbed at her loss of the traditions that he kept alive in his perfect memory and of the safeguard that they offer against fear and insecurity. She intuitively knows the importance of such games in maintaining her cultural identity and her closeness to her family members, both dead and alive. Finally, she is driven by this experience to seek from Ma what she has lost.

In the Haitian tradition, Ma answers Grace's question by asking another. She asks Grace, "Why is it that when you lose something, it is always in the last place that you look for it?" On one level, this is Ma's wry reference to what she sees as her daughters' neglect of the old Haitian ways that she espouses; in their new lives in the United States, she has become the last person they consult. On a deeper level, it is a profound statement about the paradox of memory, summed up in the old Haitian proverb that provides the answer to Ma's question. Grace knows the answer to this question well: "Because once you remember, you always stop looking." While memory keeps alive the history and culture of Haiti, a feat performed to perfection by Papa, once one has remembered, one ceases to seek. The absolute success of memory means the end of seeking, which ultimately means the loss of living history and culture. This paradox is summed up in the Haitian song that is playing on the radio immediately after Grace's dream in which she fails to answer her father's questions about the traditions of the country:

Beloved Haiti, there is no place like you. I had to leave you before I could understand you.

The words of the song suggest that being partially outside one's own culture, as Haitian immigrants to the United States such as Grace necessarily are, enables one to understand it better.

Source: Claire Robinson, Critical Essay on "Caroline's Wedding," in Short Stories for Students, Thomson Gale 2007.

Thomson Gale

In the following essay, the critic gives an overview of Edwidge Danticat's work.

Fiction writer Edwidge Danticat conjures the history of her native Haiti in award-winning short stories and novels. She is equally at home describing the immigrant experience — what she calls "dyaspora" — and the reality of life in Haiti today. Danticat's fiction "has been devoted to an unflinching examination of her native culture, both on its own terms and in terms of its intersections with American culture," wrote an essayist in Contemporary Novelists. "Danticat's work emphasizes in particular the heroism and endurance of Haitian women as they cope with a patriarchal culture that, in its unswerving devotion to tradition and family, both oppresses and enriches them." Readers will find "massacres, rapes, [and] horrible nightmares in Danticat's fiction," wrote an essayist in the St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers, "but above all these are the strength, hope, and joy of her poetic vision."

Danticat's first novel, the loosely autobiographical Breath, Eyes, Memory, was a 1998 selection of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club, thus assuring its best-seller status. Other Danticat works have won warm praise as well, with some critics expressing surprise that such assured prose has come from an author so young. Antioch Review correspondent Grace A. Epstein praised Danticat for "the real courage in excavating the romance of nationalism, identity, and home." Time reporter Christopher John Farley likewise concluded that Danticat's fiction "never turns purple, never spins wildly into the fantastic, always remains focused, with precise disciplined language, and in doing so, it uncovers moments of raw humanness."

Danticat was born in Haiti and lived there the first twelve years of her life. She came to the United States in 1981, joining her parents who had already begun to build a life for themselves in New York City. When she started attending junior high classes in Brooklyn, she had difficulty fitting in with her classmates because of her Haitian accent, clothing, and hairstyle. Danticat recalled for Garry Pierre-Pierre in the New York Times that she took refuge from the isolation she felt in writing about her native land. As an adolescent she began work on what would evolve into her first novel, the acclaimed Breath, Eyes, Memory. Danticat followed her debut with a collection of short stories, Krik? Krak! — a volume which became a finalist for that year's National Book Award. According to Pierre-Pierre, the young author has been heralded as "‘the voice’ of Haitian-Americans," but Danticat told him, "I think I have been assigned that role, but I don't really see myself as the voice for the Haitian-American experience. There are many. I'm just one."

Danticat's parents wanted her to pursue a career in medicine, and with the goal of becoming a nurse, she attended a specialized high school in New York City. But she abandoned this aim to devote herself to her writing. An earlier version of Breath, Eyes, Memory served as her master of fine arts thesis at Brown University, and the finished version was published shortly thereafter. Like Danticat herself, Sophie Caco — the novel's protagonist — spent her first twelve years in Haiti, several in the care of an aunt, before coming wide-eyed to the United States. But there the similarities end. Sophie is the child of a single mother, conceived by rape. Though she rejoins her mother in the United States, it is too late to save the still-traumatized older woman from self-destruction. Yet women's ties to women are celebrated in the novel, and Sophie draws strength from her mother, her aunt, and herself in order to escape her mother's fate.

Breath, Eyes, Memory caused some controversy in the Haitian-American community. Some of Danticat's fellow Haitians did not approve of her writing of the practice of "testing" in the novel. In the story, female virginity is highly prized by Sophie's family, and Sophie's aunt "tests" to see whether Sophie's hymen is intact by inserting her fingers into the girl's vagina. Haitian-American women, some of whom have never heard of or participated in this practice, felt that Danticat's inclusion of it portrayed them as primitive and abusive. American critics, however, appreciated Breath, Eyes, Memory. Joan Philpott in Ms. described the book as "intensely lyrical." Pierre-Pierre reported that reviewers "have praised Ms. Danticat's vivid sense of place and her images of fear and pain." Jim Gladstone concluded in the New York Times Book Review that the novel "achieves an emotional complexity that lifts it out of the realm of the potboiler and into that of poetry." And Bob Shacochis, in his Washington Post Book World review, called the work "a novel that rewards a reader again and again with small but exquisite and unforgettable epiphanies." Shacochis added, "You can actually see Danticat grow and mature, come into her own strength as a writer, throughout the course of this quiet, soul penetrating story about four generations of women trying to hold on to one another in the Haitian diaspora."

Krik? Krak! takes its title from the practice of Haitian storytellers. Danticat told Deborah Gregory of Essence that storytelling is a favorite entertainment in Haiti, and a storyteller inquires of his or her audience, "Krik?" to ask if they are ready to listen. The group then replies with an enthusiastic, "Krak!" The tales in this collection include one about a man attempting to flee Haiti in a leaky boat, another about a prostitute who tells her son that the reason she dresses up every night is that she is expecting an angel to descend upon their house, and yet another explores the feelings of a childless housekeeper in a loveless marriage who finds an abandoned baby in the streets. The New York Times Book Review reviewer, Robert Houston, citing the fact that some of the stories in Krik? Krak! were written while Danticat was still an undergraduate at Barnard College, felt that these pieces were "out of place in a collection presumed to represent polished, mature work." But Ms. contributor Jordana Hart felt that the tales in Krik? Krak! "are textured and deeply personal, as if the twenty-six-year-old Haitian-American author had spilled her own tears over each." Even Houston conceded that readers "weary of stories that deal only with the minutiae of ‘relationships’ will rejoice that they have found work that is about something, and something that matters."

Danticat's novel The Farming of Bones concerns a historical tragedy, the 1937 massacre of Haitian farm workers by soldiers of the Dominican Republic. In the course of less than a week, an estimated 12,000-15,000 Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic were slaughtered by the Dominican government or by private citizens in a classic case of "ethnic cleansing." The Farming of Bones is narrated by a young Haitian woman, Amabelle Desir, who has grown up in the Dominican Republic after being orphaned. As the nightmare unfolds around her, Amabelle must flee for her life, separated from her lover, Sebastien. In the ensuing decades as she nurses her physical and psychological wounds, Amabelle serves as witness to the suffering of her countrymen and the guilt of her former Dominican employers. The massacre, Danticat told Mallay Charters in Publishers Weekly, is "a part of our history, as Haitians, but it's also a part of the history of the world. Writing about it is an act of remembrance."

Dean Peerman wrote in Christian Century that "Breath, Eyes, Memory was an impressive debut, but The Farming of Bones is a richer work, haunting and heartwrenching." In Nation, Zia Jaffrey praised Danticat for "blending history and fiction, imparting information, in the manner of nineteenth-century novelists, without seeming to." Jaffrey added: "Danticat's brilliance as a novelist is that she is able to put this event into a credible, human context." Farley also felt that the author was able to endow a horrific episode with a breath of humanity. "Every chapter cuts deep, and you feel it," he stated, continuing on to say that Amabelle's "journey from servitude to slaughter is heartbreaking." In Amerícas, Barbara Mujica concluded that Danticat has written "a gripping novel that exposes an aspect of Dominican-Haitian history rarely represented in Latin American fiction. In spite of the desolation and wretchedness of the people Danticat depicts, The Farming of Bones is an inspiring book. It is a hymn to human resilience, faith, and hope in the face of overwhelming adversity." Jaffrey ended her review by concluding that the novel is "a beautifully conceived work, with monumental themes."

Behind the Mountains takes the form of a diary of teenage Haitian Celiane Esperance. Celiane is happy in her home in the mountains of Haiti, but she hasn't seen her father since he left for the United States years before. She had intended to join him in New York, along with her mother and older brother, but visa applications are inexorably slow. After eight years, the visas are granted, and the family reunites in Brooklyn. After an initially joyful reunion, however, the family begins to slowly unravel. A child when her father left Haiti, Celiane is now a young woman with her own mind and will. Her brother, Moy, a nineteen-year-old artist, does not quietly slip back into the role of obedient child. Even more universal concerns, such as the freezing New York winters, difficulties at school, and the need to make a living, chip away at the family's unity. Good intentions go awry in a book showcasing "friction among family members" exacerbated by "the separation and adjustment to a new country," but especially by the inevitable maturation of younger family members and the unwillingness of parents to acknowledge it, wrote Diane S. Morton in School Library Journal. Hazel Rochman, writing in Booklist, praised the "simple, lyrical writing" Danticat demonstrates in the novel. "Danticat brings her formidable skill as a writer and her own firsthand knowledge of Haiti and immigrating to America to this heartfelt story told in the intimate diary format," wrote Claire Rosser in Kliatt.

In addition to her own works, Danticat has also edited the fiction of others, including The Butterfly's Way: From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States. This work is a collection of stories, poems, and essays from Haitian writers living in America and Europe, many of whom are concerned with the feeling of displacement that is perhaps an inevitable consequence of emigration. Denolyn Carroll suggested in Black Issues Book Review that the pieces in The Butterfly's Way "help paint a vivid picture of what it is like to live in two worlds." Carroll also felt that the work adds "new dimensions of understanding of Haitian emigrant's realities. This compilation is a source of enlightenment for us all." Booklist contributor Donna Seaman found the book "a potent and piercing collection" that will help all Americans understand "the frustrations of Haitians who are now outsiders both in Haiti and in their places of refuge."

After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Haiti is Danticat's nonfiction account of her first encounter with Carnival, the boisterous, sometimes debauched, sometimes dangerous celebrations that rock Haiti every year. As a child, she did not have the opportunity to attend Carnival. Her family inevitably packed up and left for a remote area in the Haitian mountains each year to escape the celebrations, perpetuating an almost superstitious distrust of the event. At times, though, staying clear has been a good idea. During the regime of Haitian dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, carnival-goers were "subject to beatings and arrest by Duvalier's infamously unregulated militamen," wrote Judith Wynn in the Boston Herald. Danticat therefore approaches her first experience of Carnival uneasily. Her trip, however, beginning a week before the actual event, immerses her in the rich culture and history of Haiti, the cultural importance behind Carnival, and the background of the celebration itself. Danticat's "lively narrative" describes a country with a deep history, "influenced by Christianity, voodoo, Europeans, pirates, dictators, past slavery, and an uncertain economy," wrote Linda M. Kaufmann in Library Journal. Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, observed that "as in her fiction, Danticat writes about her odyssey with an admirable delicacy and meticulousness," while a Publishers Weekly critic noted that the author "offers an enlightening look at the country — and Carnival — through the eyes of one of its finest writers."

The Dew Breaker is a work of mystery and violence. It is a collection of short stories (many previously unpublished) connected by the character of the Dew Breaker, a torturer whose nickname is based on the fact that he attacks in the dawn before the dew has disappeared in the light of day. The Dew Breaker ultimately moves from Haiti to Brooklyn, becomes a barber, and raises a loving family. In Danticat's stories, the Dew Breaker reveals his secrets out of guilt, and his victims reveal their secrets, too, to ease the pain of their memories. Danticat's "spare, lyrical prose is ever present," wrote Marjorie Valbrun in the Black Issues Book Review, "in the gentle telling of stories that are soft to the ear even when pain and violence seem to scream from the pages." "The text presents two levels of truth," commented Robert McCormick in World Literature Today. In the course of reading, one comes to understand much, he hinted, but "what we don't know is just as important."

Anacaona, Golden Flower: Haiti, 1490 is a novel for the upper elementary and middle school grades, written in the form of a diary. Anacaona is a young princess of the Taíno people who comes of age in the time of Christopher Columbus. She weds a royal chieftain who lives nearby and undergoes military training to defend her island home. Booklist reviewer Gillian Engberg predicted that "readers will connect with Danticat's immediate, poetic language, Anacaona's finely drawn growing pains, and the powerful, graphic story."

"In order to create full-fledged, three-dimensional characters, writers often draw on their encounters, observations, collages of images from the everyday world, both theirs and others," Danticat remarked in a biographical essay in Contemporary Novelists. "We are like actors, filtering through our emotions what life must be like, or must have been like, for those we write about. Truly we imagine these lives, aggrandize, reduce, or embellish, however we often begin our journey with an emotion close to our gut, whether it be anger, curiosity, joy, or fear."

Source: Thomson Gale, "Edwidge Danticat," in Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2005.